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| “ | No flesh shall be spared. | „ |
| ~ Mark 13:20 |
The M.A.R.K. 13 is the main antagonist of the 1990 British sci-fi horror film Hardware. It is a homicidal robot built by the government to commit genocide to control the population crisis.
Biography
In the year 2000, the world is reduced to a post-apocalyptic society due to heatwaves caused by global warming. A droid called M.A.R.K. 13 was created as a prototype as a killing machine to control the population rate, but was lost some time ago within the desert.
A nomad scavenger finds the scraps of the droid and sells it to Alvy the junk dealer. Moses 'Hard Mo' Baxter buys the head as a Christmas gift for his girlfriend, Jill. Being an artist, Jill builds a sculpture using the M.A.R.K. 13 head, unaware of it silently monitoring her. Later, Alvy orders Mo to return to his shop, having figured out that the head he sold to him was the missing prototype of the government's plan to control the population. The other parts of the M.A.R.K. 13 that were still in Alvy's shop become active and sprays a neurotoxin that kills him. Mo learns from Alvy's notes that the machine's only weakness is humidity and contacts his friend Shades to check on Jill, but he is in the middle of a drug trip.
Back in Jill's apartment, the M.A.R.K. 13 reassembles its body by using pieces of Jill's sculptures and recharges itself by draining her apartment's power network. When it attacks her, Jill locks the robot in another room. She is left trapped in her apartment as the M.A.R.K. 13 hijacked her emergency door lock. When Jill invites her perverted neighbor Lincoln over to fix the electronics, he unlocks the room that Jill locked the M.A.R.K. 13 in to adjust the blinds, resulting in the machine killing him. Jill hides in the refrigerator, preventing the M.A.R.K. 13 from tracking her with its infrared vision. When it approaches, she attacks it but is quickly thrown to the ground, only for Mo, Shades, and a security team arrive and open fire, sending it tumbling out the window.
Just as it seemed to be over, the M.A.R.K. 13 reveals itself to be clinging on the side of the building, grabbing Jill and throwing her out the window into another apartment. As the others rush to aid Jill, Mo stays behind to distract the machine, only to be injected with a neurotoxin that slowly kills him. As Jill returns to her apartment, the M.A.R.K. 13 sets her door to continuously open and close, killing the security chief and leaving Shades trapped outside. As it finishes off the rest of the security team, Jill hacks into the M.A.R.K. 13's CPU and unsuccessfully attempts to communicate with it, but learns its weakness to water in the process. Leading it to the bathroom, Jill is unable to use the shower on the M.A.R.K. 13 until Shades arrives to distract the machine long enough for Jill to turn on the shower. As the M.A.R.K. 13 short-circuits from the water, Jill grabs a baseball bat and smashes the robot's head off, deactivating it.
Despite overcoming the robot, Jill's personality is left in permanent shock, her apartment is destroyed, and her lover deceased. The next morning, a radio broadcast announces that the test results of the M.A.R.K. 13 have been approved by the government for mass production, ensuring to remove the chip's defect to humidity.
Gallery
Trivia
- The M.A.R.K. 13 was inspired by a killer machine from SHOK!, a short comic strip that came from the 2000 AD magazine. The comic writers later sued the filmmakers for plagiarising their work.
- Originally, the M.A.R.K. 13 was to be animated through stop-motion, but was replaced with a suit due to time constraints.
- In the unreleased sequel Hardware 2: Ground Zeroes, the mass-produced M.A.R.K. 13s would serve as guards to patrol the US-Mexican border and kill off any immigrants.